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Guidelines for Tourism Partnerships and Concessions Protected Areas

Presented by Ms Barbara Engels and Dr Andrew Rylance of the IUCN WCPA Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group, at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 14th Conference of the Parties, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt on 27 November 2018

We advocate for a future that enhances conservation, human well-being, and provides accessible, educational and sustainable experiences.

The TAPAS Group is one of several voluntary groups convened under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA),

We have a network of over 500 volunteers committed to promoting sustainable tourism in protected areas globally.

We produce and disseminate knowledge on tourism in protected areas through the IUCN and our partners.

Our publications have included Journal special editions, and technical reports such as Best Practice Guidelines and guidance on Tourism concession and partnership guidelines

We build capacity through workshops and webinars (like this one), on issues such as visitor impacts, overtourism, and other topical issues

We also network among our members, and more broadly, to link and engage with others working in the field of tourism and protected areas.

Sometimes this is done online – such as through our google group mailing list and social media - and sometimes face to face.

For example during the International Year of Sustainable Tourism, we co-organised an international conference on sustainable tourism in Small Island Developing States in the Seychelles, and we devised a stream on tourism and protected areas in SIDS

The TAPAS Group is coordinated by a committed volunteer executive committee that supports members and implements our strategy. Our thematic leads manage further working groups on issues including communities and heritage, biodiversity, and economics.

Here are some of the online links you can use to find out more about the TAPAS Group, join, get involved and communicate with others.

Now I’d like to outline the background to the guidelines, and the process that we used to develop them.

The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has been addressing the area of biodiversity and tourism development since 2004, including the adoption of Guidelines on Biodiversity and Tourism Development (2004) and two guideline user manuals: ‘Managing tourism and biodiversity’ (2007), and ‘Tourism supporting biodiversity’ (2015).

Work presented to the Conference of the Parties to the CBD in 2012 concluded that the tourism sector is the largest, global, market-based contributor to financing protected area systems in many countries, through entrance and other user fees, partnerships and concessions.

However, many Parties to the CBD underutilise tourism as a means to contribute towards the financial sustainability of protected areas.

The development of these guidelines on tourism partnerships and concessions for protected aimed to respond to this under-utilized potential and to recent decisions of the CBD on tourism, which invite Parties to “. . . build the capacity of park agencies to engage in partnerships with the tourism industry to contribute financially and technically to protected areas through tools such as concessions, public-private partnerships.”

So, the TAPAS Group convened a team to work on this issue, and develop new guidelines for the CBD.

This is the process that we established, and I’ll describe each step to you

First, was the needs assessment

We developed an online survey tool which was disseminated to over 400 people.

In total, 72 people responded (approximately 18% of those contacted). There were 5 spoiled responses, leaving 67 valid responses.

The majority of valid responses were received from people based in, or working in Africa (n=47: 70%), and the remainder were from the USA, UK, South America, and Asia.

We also asked about funding, and found that the majority of funding for the PAs is from government, followed by private sector tourism No funding from NGO tourism or community tourism (or Government tourism)

Next, we developed draft guidelines

We asked people what they wanted to see in the guidelines, and used this to frame the table of contents.

We also wanted to recognised previous knowledge developed by the TAPAS Group members, and also established by agencies such as the World Bank Group, UNDP, and GIZ on this topic.

Through the online survey, we found that there was a relatively low level of awareness of existing tools, so we wanted to raise awareness of these, and also integrate useful parts into the new guidelines.

So, we drafted the guidelines, and incorporated a series of country-specific documents, case studies and tools, which were shared on a flash drive to our workshop participants from southern Africa

Next, we then moved on to a series of networking and capacity development meetings, which were also used to validate the guidelines

During the online survey we had asked what their capacity building needs were And we had also asked what content people wanted to see in the workshop.

This information helped us to design a 4-day program for the first workshop. We mixed together presentations, working groups, field trips and even ‘speed dating’ between countries on concessions.

And we had a lot of fun in the process

During the meeting we asked what people would like to do at follow – up meetings, and during follow up initiatives.

And so followed two meetings in Namibia and Mozambique, that tackled these requests in more detail.

One of the parts that people found particularly useful, was to use a financial viability model developed by Terri Castis of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park Authority

She trained the participants on how to use her model, and project internal rates of return and payback periods for concession projects.

At the end of the day, not only did the process produce a validated guideline, but also we had great feedback from the participants.

We also have a series of 6 concept proposals – building on ideas that came from the workshops – to scale up this work.

So this is what the final guideline looks like.

It includes a step-by-step process for concessioning

It includes background information, such as the types of legal instrument that can be used

It includes a number of tools, such as this one to help decide which is the best type of legal instrument to use

And also case study examples to illustrate

The guidelines are available on the CBD website

The guidelines are available English, Spanish, and French – and now in Arabic thanks to UNDP Egypt. A Portuguese version s also in development.

And a huge thanks to our sponsors for this important initiative!

Kindly note that we hope in future to upscale the initiative to Latin America, and other countries that are interested in enhancing their capacity on tourism concessions and partnerships.

If you are interested in supporting this outreach, please do let us know.

8.
Guidelines for
tourism partnerships
and concessions in
protected areas

9.
Background
• Secretariat of the Convention
on Biological Diversity work on
biodiversity and tourism
• Under-use of tourism to finance
conservation in protected areas
• Need identified for guidelines,
better capacity and networks

26.
I learnt to understand financial models which
will hence forth enable me to critically analyse
proposal during the bidding processes.
- Zambian participant
I promise you to improve the way we handle
concessions in my country for the benefit of the
people surrounding PAs, indeed the whole
country.
- Malawian participant
This has been a great benefit for the
organisation as we tried previously to engage
in some form of partnership but did not have
the capacity to handle such an initiative.
- Swazi participant